New Home Interior Door Choice

Hi there! I'm an amateur with woodworking and thought this might be a good place to get a bit of advice.

We are currently having a new home built. Our builder wanted to use Masonite interior doors and paint them white. I'm not a huge fan of that idea.

We have Pella windows that have the interior wood (pine I believe) stained dark to look similar to Mahogony. This was done at the factory by Pella.

I'm thinking it might look really nice to have the interior doors stained a similar color. We are going with a 3 panel door, two long skinny panels at the bottom and one square on the top. It's a craftsman style home.

What type of wood would be appropriate for the interior doors? I've done some google searching and there seems to be Mahogany doors available, but I'm guessing they will be very expensive. I've also seen a lot of Poplar, but I was always under the impression that Poplar was very difficult to stain evenly.

Any thoughts?
Thanks in advance.

We recently replaced all our interior doors with doors from Baird Brothers. They are great quality doors.

The only way you're going to get an interior door to really look like Mahogany is for it to actually be a Mahogany door, which will, in fact, be expensive.

With that said, I have stained and installed many interior doors that were good quality and made from Radiata Pine with very clear grain. If you used some type of conditioner first, then stain properly, then you can achieve a quality stained look with a dark stain. The grain characteristics will give away what it really is, if you're a woodworker or pay close attention to such details, but many folks seem to like the results. You could potentially achieve a very similar look to your factory stained windows if you selected the right type of pine for your doors. As I mentioned above, most of the pine I've seen recently in window and doors has been Radiata, which is usually very clear and often times vertical grain.

Wood faux finished to look like mahogany can be quite appealing. Even the folky stuff looks better than the pine stained
"mahogany". At least Google some photos, and look at some instructions.

The grain texture of pine is nothing like mahogany. That said, there is a way to stain two different woods so the same color is achieved. You just need a really talented finisher. And he will be using different materials on each.

The darker of the two clips shown here is mahogany, the other being ponderosa pine, the species most commonly used for interior doors.

When we reworked our house we went with a craftsman feel as well. Our house had the original VGDF flooring and some original VGDF windows and doors. The original wood had darkened to a near mahogany color which we liked. We sourced doors from a salvage yard, I built reproduction windows for the spots that needed windows, and got/built new trim and various mouldings and had to build 7 reproduction doors -still in progress- to match the salvage ones (to be used for slider door closets). Everything was stained using a mix of dyes after pre conditioning to prevent blotching. The bottom line is just what Gene said: You can get the color, but the grain will never be the same. And the color is a PITN since it will tend to fade, which has occurred in some places in my house.

Example pic below:

Attachment 352674

mahagony veneer over a cheaper substrate like poplar? I'm considering doing something like that with QS oak.